Ross Millard Said About Kate Bush

The love of Kate Bush goes right across The Futureheads. For Barry and Dave – The Hyde brothers – they heard Kate Bush around the house quite a lot when they were younger and they knew the video off VH1 and whatever.

I didn’t really get into her like that. It was more me getting into the ’70s and ’80s guitar bands. The stuff we are often said to be referencing, like XTC, and enjoying the pop moments of those bands and trying to see where that went I stumbled across the video to ‘Cloudbusting‘ one day. It’s the video where she has that weird weather, making machine, and I was hooked.

The idea of us covering ‘Hounds Of Love’ came from a couple of summers ago when we did a DIY tour of squat clubs in Germany and Holland. We went with a band from Newcastle called Milky Wimpshake. They booked the tour, we were just 18 to 19 at the time and they liked us so they invited us to do all the show. It was a dream for us because it meant we were still quite young. Anyway, Jaff our bass player had made a compilation tape and ‘Hounds Of Love’ was on it.

Christine, the bass player in the other band, was saying how great it would be to play that live because obviously Kate Bush is pretty much reclusive and never really does show.

There’s all this talk about her making a new record, but it’s been going on for the five years and no-one knows if it will ever see the light of day.

We were thinking that it’s a brilliant song and we thought we’d try and work it out – a little challenge. We got home and it was a really quick thing. And when we played it… it just stuck. People were going barmy for it.

I think that something we try to take from Kate Bush are the arrangements of the music. She made quite melodious pop music, but it’s really clever. It’s not traditional verse/chorus/verse song structure. There are interesting parts coming in and out of the songs all the time.

By the time she made ‘Hounds Of Love’, she was doing everything herself. She produced the record, she arranged it all, she wrote all the songs. And you’ve got to have respect for someone with that level of control.

Aside from making great music, she was a fox back in the day. All the sleeve artwork on ‘Hounds Of Love’ she has it all, really.

She could really sing, she could really play, she called all the shots and she was a beautiful woman as well. It put her in a very powerful position.

She also carries a great mystique because she’s a complete recluse. I know that she was some kind of child prodigy, she signed a development deal with EMI when she was 14 and was always geared towards making that first album, ‘The Kick Inside‘.

I don’t know how she dealt with it, but that’s really intense pressure. And she delivered the goods. She has written some classic albums and all have a little identify of their own